Beautiful article on how to stay motivated in the creative field:
Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?
Read more in Kevin Cornell's article on A List Apart.
Kimmy Paluch over at paradymesolutions.com presents a nice write-up on what actually constitutes User Experience Design. These elements add to the overall idea of user experience:
Kimmy continues to say,
User experience is the culmination of all of these parts into one field. Although, user experience design does not wholly contain these fields (that is to say, some research and practices in each of these fields falls outside the realm of the user experience) it does serve to unite many of the principles so as to improve each of the facets of the user experience.
The following image nicely shows the interaction of the various disciplines:
(source: http://www.paradymesolutions.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2006/
10/user%20experience%20design%20explained.gif)
The post additionally covers an evaluation of uxd as a form of design and some thoughts on the design process. Definitely worth reading!